Re: One Year of Mac GUI Vault

[dog_cow@macgui.com (D Finnigan)]

Toinet wrote:
> Congratulations, Sir, for your work. Your site is worth visiting.
> 

Thanks, but it's certainly not perfect!

In my opinion, it has two major problems, one of which is probably
exclusive, and the second of which is a part of other archives of well.

The first problem which I've noticed from analyzing traffic logs, and
following specific site visitors, is that many people can't figure out how
to navigate the site. The site navigation needs to be redesigned. The
problem is that while the amount of hits I get from search engines is
substantial, many visitors only click to another page (if even that far) and
do not explore other areas of the site which may contain information
relating to their search query.

As an example, if a user searched for "XYZ," intending to get a link to
download the software, he might instead be directed to a Usenet article
discussing "XYZ." The article, of course, has no link to download. The user
gives up without clicking on any links, and presumably tries another site. I
see this quite often.

Two solutions that I have in mind are to:
a.) Redesign the site navigation such that it's more conventional, with a
list of major site areas at the top of each page.

b.) Show "related content" when in the Vault pages. To go on the Usenet
"XYZ" example, I could have a search be run on the download files and
knowledge base text articles for certain keywords. These links would be
presented in a side bar, and hopefully the visitor will take notice and be
inspired to click around the site.


The second problem, which is shared by other sites, is that many of the file
names are impenetrable. That is, it is nearly impossible to tell what a file
does just by looking at its name. This seems to be worse with the Apple II
files, which often have truncated, abbreviated file names.

Some examples of these file names:
- Bsw2c 1
- Stfc.2.1
- Ifs

What do these files do? Who knows? At least they are categorized, so we
would get some indication that the first file has something to do with text
processing, the second is a game, and the third file has to do with
graphics. Otherwise, that's it. It's up to the user to get the file into an
emulator and see what it does.

I've got some solutions for this problem as well, but they aren't as easy as
the first problem (navigation and related content). There are descriptions
and documentation for many files, but they're not "attached" to the file on
its download page. Some ASCII-encoded binary files have description and
comments at the top, and other files have docs in the Knowledge Base. I need
to write a script to scan files for comments, as well as link the KB text
files with the download files.


But at least we've got something. :-)